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When I was a little kid, and I still got a chance to read the Sunday newspaper, I would always stumble my way upon a little feature that was usually buried somewhere in the classifieds. There would be a Sears-style portrait of an elderly couple, and a little caption honoring them for having hit 50, 55, 60 years of marriage. The caption would describe who they were, where they’d met, where they were from, and so on. Even as a kid, I’d be touched by the idea that there were couples that stayed with each other through thick and thin, and had survived through countless struggles and were still smiling. I come from a two-parent family; until middle school, I wasn’t really aware that a lot of my peers didn’t have the exact same background. It’d be crude and reductive to call myself lucky, but I had it differently, at least.

I’m also an only child, and for a long time, I only saw the positive in it. On Christmas, I’d get all the cool presents. All the attention could be lavished on me. Granted, unlike some of the kids at my school, I didn’t have the frivolous luxuries, like watching all the R-rated movies or more adult-oriented TV shows on the networks at later hours. But I saw the good in being the only child. But I remember going to visit my grandmother on my mother’s side when I was about 17, and feeling the same way I imagine others do when they enter a nursing home. On the one hand, a nursing home fills a necessary function, but the word “inviting” never comes to mind. I was put off by the sterility of the place, but also by the unnerving feeling that one day I’d be in my mother’s shoes.

Looking at my grandmother in bed, an old, lovely woman who’d led a full life, I wondered if one day, I’d have to put one or both of my parents into a nursing home. Would I be able to take them in myself and provide adequate care? (As I get older, I think about this a little more each year, and the answer still frustrates me, always being “I don’t know.”) Would I want to put either of my parents into what amounts to an offshoot of a hospital wing? Something I thought about less before, but will consider more now, is the following: would I want to separate my parents, if it came to that? They’ve been together for over 30 years, and if they’re both alive 20 or 25 years from now (when they’d be past 75 years old), wouldn’t they still be in love?

These kinds of questions are a metaphorical bucket of cold water, and they were brought into full view as I watched Make Way For Tomorrow, a profoundly moving and incredibly sad film from director Leo McCarey. McCarey won the Best Director Oscar three times in his career, but not for this film. The same year Make Way For Tomorrow came out, McCarey (who directed the best Marx Brothers comedy, Duck Soup) won for his direction of the screwball comedy The Awful Truth. He would later direct The Bells Of St. Mary’s. To say that he was versatile is a bit of an understatement. McCarey was supposedly proudest of his work in Make Way For Tomorrow, and who can blame him? Though the film is one of the great tearjerkers (if you do not even well up by the end of this film, I fear for your humanity), it’s not punishing.

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